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Proxima Aims to Fill CRO Gap for Houston’s Growing Biotech Community

Houston—Medical research is big business in Houston, but life science companies sometimes find they’re missing out on the clinical trial services typically provided by contract research organizations (CROs). Proxima Clinical Research wants to fill that gap, and the new company plans a more customer-focused approach to do it.

“We plan to implement ‘agile development’ into CROs,” says Pamela Kennedy, Proxima’s vice president of global business development. “We will offer a help desk. It will be by phone, e-mail, or in-person. A founder can just walk in and say, ‘I have this product.’ They don’t need an appointment.”

That approach, she says, differs from the typically more bureaucratic approach most CROs employ, she says. Another way the organization says it aims to stand apart from competitors is that Proxima will focus exclusively on early stage biotech and medical device companies.

“A CRO is a missing link in the Houston biotech ecosystem,” Lawson told me last year as he was planning what became Proxima. “We have lots of startups at TMC but when they are ready to go to the FDA and engage with a CRO … they go out of state and sometimes this means the company itself would be lured out of state.”

Focusing on early stage companies is not novel, but “it’s extremely important,” says Jonathan Gertler, managing partner and CEO of life sciences consultancy Back Bay Life Science Advisors in Boston. “When you are starting to grow an ecosystem—which is clearly being done now in the Houston area—what you want to try to do is provide critical infrastructure.”

As part of the larger Texas Medical Center, Kennedy says Proxima has partnerships with hospitals that will enable better access to physicians and patients needed to run and participate in clinical trials. And Gertler says its location at the Innovation Institute gives it direct access to TMCx accelerator startups, as well as startups at JLabs. “You can develop a level of trust just walking the halls and … Next Page »